Night Owl Cards

Right now the baseball buzz on social media is the World Baseball Classic. While I'm happy to see people talking about more baseball, I can't get into the WBC more than periodic glances. A few reasons just to make sense of how I feel:   1. We just had two weeks of an international sports event. I'm tapped out. 2. March has enough chaos and energy -- March Madness, right? I don't need more. 3. The WBC seems to run on star power, which really isn't my focus in baseball (Yes, I know the Dodgers have a ton of stars, I do feel conflicted about that).   For baseball all I need is the Dodgers and the other MLB teams that play the Dodgers. I have a difficult time getting invested in any other kind of baseball, whether that's Olympic, collegiate, Banana Ball or any of the many, many non-MLB leagues through history. I've found where my heart will reside forever -- as corporate as MLB may be now.   My collection reflects that -- in the pursuit of MLB-themed sets and, o...

  In many ways it seems like the years are speeding up and 2023 has only been three months long. But sometimes I think back to something and say to myself "was that still in this year?"   I knew I wanted to review my trades for the year on Trading Card Database but I could've sworn that I started trading in 2022. That's just my fading brain. I wrote vigorously about my first TCDB trades and they were in February of this year.   Before TCDB trading I didn't think I needed it. I was trading plenty through the blogs and the thought of taking extra time for another trading avenue was not appealing or seemed doable. I was wrong about that, although it does seem like extra work sometimes. I still trade through the blogs, on a much more smaller scale (because everyone's doing the TCDB thing), and sometimes I mix things up. I list a card available for trade on TCDB but then ship it off in a non-TCDB deal and forget to update its status on TCDB (in TCDB trades, the sta...

  Sometimes I wonder if when I write certain sentences, readers see them as a challenge. I put words out into the internet space and people interpret them as they like. It's wild to see what they come up with sometimes. This latest example was no challenge or call to action or dare or anything like that. All I said a couple weeks ago was:  "It's not like I'm looking to pad my collection on (TCDB). I have plenty of his cards (277) and now that's he's with the Rangers, he won't be climbing up from his No. 16 ranking among the players with the most cards in my collection." This is what I wrote about my Corey Seager cards. That's when people grabbed the imaginary gauntlet off the ground, raised it above their heads and exclaimed, "Challenge accepted!!!" OK, that's what I envision based on what I've since received. On that same post, I went through some of the Seager cards I own (that are not scanned on TCDB, and, no, I haven't do...

  Longtime readers might know that I was diagnosed as diabetic almost 12 years ago. It pretty much floored me, but I went to work right away and within three months I was in remission. At the time I was determined to get myself healthy the natural way without medicine, and it worked. I continued to do that through doctor visit after doctor visit. Warding off diabetes without any pills is not easy. I also did not check my sugar regularly, which has received some blank stares from nurses. It's kind of a tightrope act, I need to be super-vigilante about my weight and what I eat, but the theory on that lifestyle choice is, "that's what you should be doing anyway," so why not? Diabetes gets progressively worse as you age, and I've been coping with holding it off for more than 11 years. I'm not young anymore, I'm more than halfway to 100, and I've noticed it getting more difficult. A couple pounds over can make a difference. I'm no longer opposed to medi...

  The card blogging scene has ebbed and flowed during the 15 years that I have been doing this. It's gone from sensation to "so-uncool" to consistently and always there. Blogging about cards isn't going away, no matter how much it gets dismissed or ignored.   Aside from writing about cards, which has always been the why, one of the very few constants in all that blogging time is giveaways.   From Tribe Cards to Johnny's Trading Spot, the generosity is off the chart for blogs. I don't care what Twitter says with its RAKs and "hobby fams" (lordy, that phrase is annoying), nothing has the history that blogs do for sending off cards just because.   Sometimes months go by without some sort of giveaway and then all of a sudden they're back, two, three, four at a time. The prize hounds know this, too. Often the only time I see a comment from certain someones is when there's something in it for them.   But I do try to win cards, too -- I just make su...